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Skyrim has now patched on PC, after the 360 and PS3 saw their version of 1.2 appear earlier in the week. But is it good news? 1.1 managed to break lots of the patches modders had created to fix so many of the tiresome issues Bethesda had left in the epic game, which didn’t win favour. And then today the news broke that the console patch had had some rather unfortunate side effects. Like all defensive buffs no longer working, and the dragons flying backward. No, really. So below you can see what’s meant to be in 1.2 – including a fix for that daft audio crash, mouse improvements, and at flipping last Esc backs out of menus – and then you can let us know if you’ve seen anything strange since the update.

Oh, and dead bodies will no longer show up to your wedding.

I’m currently in a Dwarven dungeon you see, so can’t really bring news on flying dragons, but I’m racing through in the hope of finding one. Anyhow, this is what Bethesda intended to fix:

- Fixed crash on startup when audio is set to sample rate other than 44100Hz

– Fixed issue where projectiles did not properly fade away

– Fixed occasional issue where a guest would arrive to the player’s wedding dead

– Dragon corpses now clean up properly

– Fixed rare issue where dragons would not attack

– Fixed rare NPC sleeping animation bug

– Fixed rare issue with dead corpses being cleared up prematurely

– Skeleton Key will now work properly if player has no lockpicks in their inventory

– Fixed rare issue with renaming enchanted weapons and armor

– Fixed rare issue with dragons not properly giving souls after death

– ESC button can now be used to exit menus

– Fixed occasional mouse sensitivity issues

– General functionality fixes related to remapping buttons and controls

Honestly, I’m a bit disappointed about the lack of corpses coming to my nuptials. And the projectiles not fading was a brilliant bug. But still, it’s good to see some of the issues being loudly raised are being addressed. Still no word on improving the horrendous interface, sadly, but I’m hopeful industrious modders are working on that as we quest.

You can enjoy the sight of a PS3 dragon’s backward flying below:

Edit: I’m disappointed to say that the dragon I’ve seen was flying forward.

My second zombie, the one I fill up with all my heavy loot, often refuses to fast travel with me now, becoming completely lost in the process. The effect list still states he is ambling about somewhere, just not with me :(
Fortunately Orchendor, my first and frankly awesome teleporting zombie never abandons my side.

The USP guys have stated that they won’t be releasing a patch until Bethesda has released at least one more of their own.
If you want to to help they have their own bug tracker and are sending the results to Bethesda: link to unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com

I’m running 1.2 and have had no crashes or other issues that others are running into. The magic resist bug is very noticeable though. I have to pretty much stealth kill any master mage now or drink a ton of health potions.

Bugs are fun when they’re stuff like backwards-flying dragons, crazy physics glitches, or corpses crashing weddings. Not so fun when they’re CTDs or save corruption. I wish Bethesda would focus more on the latter.

I’d love to “deal with it”, but since my game crashes roughly every twenty minutes now and all my previous saves have become corrupted and unusable, it’s hard to find the time between deep sighing and rubbing my temples until the pain goes away to actual get any decent dealing done.

@Bleeters – that sounds exactly like what was happening in Fallout: New Vegas, and there was a very simple fix for that. I was crashing every 20 minutes on my Win7 X64, ATI powered system. After the tweak, plain-sailing.

As it’s the same engine only heavily spruced up maybe you could try and apply that? I wish I had the link to give you but it’s been lost.

I’ve found that waiting 3-6+ months before playing Oblivion/Fallout/F:NV has greatly improved the experience. By then, the game is generally stable, and the mod scene has produced some good/useful mods. Fortunately, I’ve got a backlog of 6+ games to play in the meantime.

A lot of people recommend disabling automatic updates for the game for the time being and waiting until the issues settle down. Some report nothing at all, other report even more broken UI, graphic glitches, save-game corruption, etc.

Yep, did that after I heard about the mess the last patch caused for some people. . . . . didn’t stop Steam doing it anyway however.
I then checked, I had auto update disabled for all games for exactly this reason, all enabled now.

I’d wager one of the almost daily Steam updates probably reset everything.
Steam gets a lot of bad press but you can chalk this up as my only major gripe with it so far. . . .

1) The game crashed, lots. And lots. Attempting to fast travel? That’s a crash for you. Trying to load any of my more recent saved games? Crash. Been more than a few minutes since the game crashed? Have a crash.

2) After a while, all my saves broke. By which I mean, all of them are now flagged as corrupted and won’t load. So that’s around 30 hours of play down the drain.

I think I’d rather live with whatever issues this apparently solved, thanks. Not that I have that option, having bought it from steam.

Sometimes I feel like the only man in history who has never had one crash with any Bethesda product.

Yes, we do exist. And our existence could arguably mean it is something on your PCs conflicting with the game. I know I keep a very clean gaming PC, putting all my utilities and such on my laptop instead.

Stinging Velvet – What a peculiar line of reasoning. By your own admission, players that never suffer from crashes in Bethesda games are exceptionally rare, yet some how this leads you to the corollary that there must be something wrong with beeters computer ? I suspect you don’t really understand how PC gaming works, that or you’re just being arrogant and obtuse.

@mondomau: I think it’s a reasonable conclusion, when comparing those afflicted by crashes and those not, that there is something about the former group’s PCs which conflicts with something about the game. The error is in assuming that the fault lies with the PCs.

I’ve been blessed with Bethesda games in the past – I spent 80 hours playing through Fallout NV starting on Boxing Day last year without any issues whatsoever. I’m not arrogant or stupid enough to think that’s down to how ‘clean’ my PC is – it isn’t, as I use it for a lot of things far more important to me than gaming – but it did make me glad I don’t work in PC games QA.

As for Skyrim, I’m trying to stay well clear until it’s been stabilized one way or another, although I suspect that Mrs Llewyn will insist on buying it for me this month…

@ Llewyn: “The error is in assuming that the fault lies with the PCs.” Yes, this was essentially the point I was making, hence asking if stingingvelvet understood how PC gaming works (i.e. infinite number of variables in hardware /software configuration = nightmare for programmers) though it obviously wasn’t clear enough, probably because I had only been up 10 minutes by that point. Also, I was grumpy.

Installed Windows 7 x64 on a brand new SSD the other day, still crashing to desktop every couple of hours or so. Could be the 4GB loader, could be MSI Afterburner running in the background, highly likely to at least partly be Beth’s fault given that Oblivion would regularly crash my PS3 back in the day.

Also, having to open up the console to finish quests is not fun. But the rest of the bugs are.

If it helps I am running the 4gb exe and afterburner on Win7 64 and have had only a couple of crashes in 60 odd hours. And they all occurred before I knew to reduce the audio quality and run the 4gb exe!

Only difference being I’m not running it from my SSD, no point with this game really, loading is quick and it’s not really utilising GPU or CPU properly at this point.

If you go to the Skyrim Wiki and look up the quest, there’s a chance they’ll have posted instructions for how to complete it using a console command. I couldn’t complete a quest with that elf you plant a ring on in Riften because he thought everyone was corrupt, including me. So I reached inside his mind and made him like me just enough to let me tell him about his family history.

This patch actually messed up custom keys even more than previously. Yes we can now use Esc. to exit menus, but I could then no longer use Tab to do the same. Having gotten used to it up to this point, that was incredibly maddening.

Then I go to the map and find I can no longer pan north. See they fixed it so the map recognized my remapped movement controls (WASD -> ESDF), but E is still bound to “Center on Player”. So I try to pan up and end up going back to myself instead. Brilliant.

But then come the modders to the rescue again. This beauty will let you unbind and rebind all the existing keys, as well as allowing you to have multiple keybinds for one function. So I can have Esc, Tab AND M close the map, woo! The only thing that absolutely refuses to change is R to drop/give items from your inventory.

When I tried to install the new version since it had the same file name I just went to write over it with the unzip. Turns out when the game hangs on the menu screen like that it doesn’t always close all its processes completely when you end task in task manager. Long story short, the file wouldn’t overwrite until I killed the right processes. So if you’re having this problem and you’re looking to fix it by going no arrows keep that in mind.

Indeed! I was having the same problem. Apparently by CTRL-ALT-DEL’ing my way out when I saw no menu text, it would leave the 4GBSkyrim program running in the background, needless to say, I didn’t figure it out until I had nine instances of it open…

One worrying thing is that from what I read is that PS3 owners (who got the patch on the 28th) were already reporting that 1.2 broke resistances, and Bethesda went ahead and released the patch for the PC and 360 anyway.

So Bethesda just sat around and waited for Xbox360 and PC users to find out if the patch was broken for them too?

From what I’ve read, magic resistance has been broken across all platforms, which kinda seems like a big deal. I backed up my entire game folder before starting Steam and disabling automatic patch updates and just recopied it over to stay on the 1.1 patch since this also, predictably, breaks the 4gb Skyrim mod. They really screwed this up, there was nothing on the bug list they were fixing that is as crippling as dragons that fly backwards or no magic resistance.

The resistances are broken. Frankly there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to this patch beyond the problems its created. I’ve still got some weird AI bugs (Sybille Stentor no longer leaves her bed) and there are still quest problems (my second character cannot trigger Blood on the Ice, even with the console). It seems to have fixed the very minor issues they listed and absolutely nothing else.

Guess what Bethesda? I could fix that audio bug myself by just turning the setting down. I can exit the menus by clicking Tab or the shortcuts to the menus, which you already had implemented. Maybe prioritize the bigger issues, or just wait until you’ve got more to show until you release a patch. Don’t feel the need to release simultaneous patches if the only really, truly bad one is for the PS3. Most of us really don’t think of console players as C.H.U.D.S. We won’t feel angry if they get a patch to allow them to play the game at all while we wait for one that simply improves our experience.

I am not ashamed to admit I pirated this, I fully intended to buy it but had a serious cashflow problem at the time (genuine too, honestly :P)
Finally sorted out that problem and was going to buy it, but then they broke it with patches so I’m just going to stick with my most stable 1.0 version of the game until it’s properly stable in a few months, then they’ll get my money :)

The game is hardly unstable, its a TINY fraction of the players that’ve gotten any serious errors. Neither I nor my 15+ friends that play the game has experienced -ANY- bugs besides the always fun ragdoll related ones, so thats really not an excuse, give them your money! The game is worth it ;p
Also; I fucking love Skyrim. Least buggy bethesda game ever to have seen the light of day ;>

@FRIENDLYUNIT
It makes no difference to Bethesda whether you play a pirated version while you wait until you have enough money. They get their money at the same time, you just get to play it for longer.

Honestly? I have crash to desktop issues without the 4gb workaround, but otherwise it’s a very playable and stable game at the time…well..one of my companions was dead on the ground when I walked into town once…but really that was the first time that happened and the only time it did. The vast majority of my play time has been bug free.

I suggest buy it now, and keep playing your pirated copy if you’re worried about what flaws remain, though none of them are DRM related so I don’t see how it’ll help.

I hope the fix is the problem where if you equip (for instance) a staff and a spell, suddenly, one of the axis (up/down) has about ten times the sensitivity, with the added bonus of not being accurate at all (jumping 30-40 pixels at a time).

That dragon isn’t flying backwards because of some bug, that’s just the very first captured footage of the dragon mating ritual, he’s trying to impress the lady dragons. The poor thing was just looking for a little bit of action, after being dead for a thousand(?) years, and that guy just shot arrows in its face. Nice job, hero.

No! As a true Skyrim dragonologist it is a well known fact that the apparent “head” of the skyrim dragon is actually its tail, while the head is at the “tail”… this is to fool any predators into attacking the much less important tail appendage… in the same way that some caterpillars feature this sort of “false head”.

Any real dragonologist knows dragons mate by collecting horses to ride upon their back, to take them as offertory gifts to the female. The female dragons are also 10 times bigger.

I won’t go into the real mechanics of their so-called “breath” attacks.

I would like to point out that, according to science, that turning a flight surface backwards will cause the plane to go down and not up. This also applies to dragons, which are just a sort of slow, wiggly, lazy plane, afterall.

My claims can be verified by going to this site: link to amasci.com and looking at section titled “Why use ‘airfoil’ shape at all?”.

EDIT: I am aware that all of the claims in this comment are intentional fabrications. I find that sort of thing funny.

Don’t patch for now if you still can. The patch introduced a major bug with resistances – both on gear and racials. Just had a few quite difficult dragon fights despite all of my frost/fire resistance gear.

Actually, those wont attack at all unless provoked. Theres a decent bit of them, which are kind of optional to fight, it doesnt depend on level. (Level does give you more different kinds of dragons to encounter though, tougher ones etc etc)
Or atleast I still get the “roaming” / “circling” ones, @ level 46. ;P

If it’s a bug then it’s a good one. I’ve encountered 4 dragons so far in my playthrough, the first 3 attacked me immediately but the 4th one left me a nervous wreck because it just circled above me for almost 10 minutes like the world’s most terrifying buzzard. I suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to go explore in that dark cave surrounded by skeletons I’d passed by earlier.

QD Inventory is a good start at fixing the inventory interface. It’s still key-based, but putting the categories at the top and the item stats against all the items at least speeds up/reduces the scrolling you have to do.

I dont know, I mean the way the game bugs.. it kinda makes the game what it is, the fact that I could never cure vampirism on Oblivion or the fact that Maramal just stands and looks blindly at me despite the fact I’m supposed to be married by now.. it’s what makes a bethesda game a bethesda game.

EDIT: Or the fact that the fighter’s guild in Morrowind in that weird island to the east? Wolverine hall or whatever it was called… too long to remember. When I got there, everyone was dead inside. No reason, it just was.
I just thought “Hahaha Elder Scrolls… I love you!”
I’d never have it any other way :)

Hmm, worrying. I think I updated to 1.1, will hold off on updating to 1.2. I have had no issues whatsoever, not even crashing and Skyrim came out during my holiday so I put in some silly hours. I only fiddled with some basic .ini settings and the uGrid thing just confused me and I don’t want to break my quite high level save. Haven’t even delved into any mods yet. The only thing I have done is run using the 4GB utility but then since it ran smoothly on “high” before I’m not sure if there is any difference or need for me to use it.

You see, this is why I don’t run out and buy new games anymore. I’ll probably play this in a few years time. The bugs will have been crushed, by the devs or the modders.The DLC will be bundled in. The best mods will have been made and filtered for quality.. It will be cheaper then. I’ll have a PC that can do it justice.

It’s not like I don’t have enough games to play. I was playing Morrowind last year. After about ten years of polishing it’s fantastic. Right now my RPG itch is being scratched by Baldurs’ Gate, in the from of the BigWorld mod. It’s a dream. Lots of quality content added, bugs crushed. Running at high res. Zero loading times.

The last couple of times I bought a full-priced game at release I felt burned. I’ll check in with Skyrim sooner or later. No rush.

Will there ever be a Skyrim comments thread without people boasting to the world that they’ve not bought it, and will wait for the GotY edition? Well, maybe when the GotY edition is release, I guess. I’m fairly sure that they post to convince themselves that they’re not missing out and don’t need the game, when clearly they are and do.

The bugs are not bad. I’ve had 2 CTDs in 40+ hours play, and no broken quests. The bugs I have seen have been minor, like some wonky NPC AI, and usually only visual and comical, like a flying mammoth. If bugs is the reason you’re refusing to buy, then don’t. This is one of the less buggy releases I’ve purchased this year.

I’ve had 3 quests that broke partially. I’ve been able to solve them all except for one where every time I travel to Markarth I get arrested.

I’ve also had some pretty bad stuttering problems in first person that could only be fixed by playing in windowed mode or downloading a patch that capped the game’s framerate.

I told myself I would wait. Why didn’t I!
It really is a very buggy game, people are just encountering an incredibly large variety of different problems. I actually find a lot of the bugs (like backwards dragons, or the random cloned npcs) to be a lot of fun, but the game is a teetering house of cards at the moment.

Had heard about the console patch trouble, and meant to turn off auto patching, but forgot. It patched. However I haven’t had any trouble in two and a half hours play, although didn’t pay much attention to magic resistance. Dragons were flying forward though.

Haven’t had a huge number of bugs, although the first patch did seem to introduce CTDs every couple of hours. (None seen this session, although that might be due to adding TESV.exe to my DEP exclusions list.) Only other issue is some shonky physics, and the non fading projectiles, although I hadn’t realised that was a bug.

If you have any Mods installed, they’re going to fuck your game up, so you’ll want to remove any if you’re having problems. I couldn’t start my game with one of the Smithing mods that a lot people recommended enabled.

Sigh, i was wondering what was going on, i spend the last few days living under a rock… well, not realy, i’ve been investing over 80 hours into skyrim over the course of the last 4 days or so.

At first everything was fine, but now i’m running into dragons flying backwards and fresh bugs I did not encounter before (and the game doesn’t seem to run that well all in all either).
(I am a PC user btw, as i saw someone mentioned the dragons being a console only issue,..someone somewhere.)

This patch is a disaster. Do the sensible thing and revert to 1.1. You can do this only on Win 7:

Right-click skyrim folder in Steam folder, hit properties, previous versions tab, then copy over last night’s version of the folder into some other location. Delete the existing Skyrim folder, replace with the old Skyrim folder.

Before doing that, though, right click the game in steam and go into the properties or whatever to tell it not to auto update.

I also heard that it will auto update anyway if you tell Steam to start up with your PC but I don’t know.

I must be the luckiest person alive when it comes to bugs or something because I rarely experience them, and when I do their usually trivial/funny glitches. I’ve run into two bugs with skyrim. One during the “cornered rat” quest. That was easily fixed. The second near the end when you first fight alduin (he never showed up). That was easily fixed.

I know several people in real life who pirate games, and none of them had less cash than me, they simply had their priorities someplace else. They buy silly ear-candy headphones, fancy trench coats, overly tight jeans and all sorts of other absurdities. Evidently they just don’t care about games as much as I do. Also they are hipster douchebags, but that’s not the point.

If you seriously can’t wait to play a game and don’t want to pay for it, then clearly they’ve made a really good game that really appeals to you but you don’t feel like supporting that. Launch sales are actually a huge metric that publishers use to decide what studios are successful and what aren’t, so if you’re pirating it as the only alternative to buying it ASAP, then you’re sending a message that the game you can’t wait for still just isn’t good enough.

I’ll give one caveat though, games really do need demos. Sometimes I resort to renting them on console, since so many things are cross-platform these days, but then I end up never buying them since I’ve already taken the sheen off the entire game (partly due to being on an inferior platform). Some PC-only games that don’t have demos, I just wait until they’re either crazy cheap or never buy them at all. Either way, they miss out due to not having a demo.

edit: Reply Fail. This was supposed to be a post about how I’m just not going to play Skyrim until they come out with another patch, for fear that they’re going to break all my saves if I load them now, but instead it posted this thing from earlier in the thread.

I’m just going to stop playing until they come out with another patch. 140 hours in-game is enough for now, I think, and I just picked up that introversion bundle (only got Aquaria, Dungeons of Dredmor and Defcon but still worth it) so at least I have something else to do.

I’m on XP and it seems okay to me (but haven’t played a huge amount since the patch). One thing that’s annoying me is that they still haven’t fixed the XP bug that causes stuttering and freezing when walking through open areas. The workaround (using compatibility mode and re-activating the second CPU core) hopefully still works. Will come back here if it doesn’t.

I was greeted (PC) by game not starting, shortcut broke and launching game would just start launcher and hitting play restart it,

I did that steam recheck game files thingie, steam said one file was corrupted redownloaded it and game played fine.

I have not noticed any bugs appearing in the game, I managed to clean several dungeons and finish sanguine quest before it was time to go to work, can’t say anything about dragon, haven’t seen one after the one attacking Helgen, not in the mood to start MQ, I recon dragon hunting will feel more epic after I have archieved some skill and fame in skyrim.

No problems after the patch for me, my mods work ok, killed 2 dragons. I don’t know about resistances but the few fights I had seemed normal to me. Then again I’m not the kind of person who notices that stuff unless it’s glaringly obvious. I hope they fix things, it’s a pity that some people can’t play such a great game. On the other hand heavily modified .ini’s and mods seem to be a recipe for disaster.

Most of the problems raised seem to be as a direct result of fucking around with ini’s and adding mods not made within the construction kit. The amount of moaning from the PC crowd (I am a cross platform person including PC) is enough for Bethesda to just stop developing for that market altogether. Whilst it may be fun and in some ways productive to mess around with the settings you can hardly blame Bethesda for some of the crashings/CTDs. I for one am playing this on a PC within minimal tweaks and haven’t encountered many problems at all (except with the screwed mouse/joypad vertical look introduced in the new patch – remedied by creating a new ini).

Let’s just ignore all the bugs and crashes that the PC crowd fixed in Fallout 3 that the whiny console community never had access to, shall we? Good grief, you have a selective memory. Are you one of them forum plants that BBC were talking about?

Anyway, here’s something funny for you: The ENBSeries patch, the DLL thingy that also comes bundled with the Enhanced Shaders mod (that I’m using) made the game more stable. It used to be that I’d get a tiny stall every 10 or so seconds, which was incredibly frustrating, and the game would just do a silent CTD on every third or fourth taskswitch. Both of these issues were gone before and after the patch.

This was a case of a modder working to increase the stability and performance of the game, and succeeding at it. In fact, I’d recommend that people having CtD issues actually have a look at that, since the random CtD issues seem to be graphically inclined, even the zoning ones, I imagine.

So yeah, let’s forget all the good that modders have done for Bethesda throughout the years, let’s gut them and put their mutilated, lifeless corpses up on display, purely because they’re going through a pre-CK rough patch. Let’s ignore the fact that they’ve already fixed a number of quest issues (like the Esbern one), which Bethesda has not (which I actually needed), and let’s ignore the inevitable community bugfix patch that will fix so much.

Yeah. Let’s do that. That would be so good of us.

Again, are you one of them forum plants BBC talked about, here just to sew the seeds of discord?

I was so confused by that. See, I went werewolf and I had no trouble taking those guards out. Then I left and none of the other guards said anything, it was like it had never happened. Apparently Beth hadn’t considered that anyone would have a way to take out those three guys, so… it was a bit of a mess. Thankfully I had a quicksave so I could go back and do it the ‘proper’ way, the way they’d intended me to but I didn’t because free will.

The two times I’ve done it, the guards have been quite tough, and more have come. One time Vigilant Tyrannus(? I forget his name) came in from the street to help, and he was unkillable. In any case, it seems they just keep sending guards after you, and guards who refuse to do anything other than send you to prison. So I’d say they did consider that people could take out those three guards, and if you really managed to kill them and get away before more swarmed you, well, that’s a legitimate conclusion to that quest. You avoided going to jail, but you’ll quite naturally have a large Reach bounty on your head because of all the murders you’ve been connected to, so you’ll have to leave town. Seems a reasonable conclusion to that quest to me.

The problem I am experiencing now is potentially to do with the latest patch. I bought the game when I was in Denmark, with my Steam account I set up in the UK (bear with me) I am currently in Tokyo and I had been happily playing Skyrim in my hotel room, attempting to fight off a cold.. But when I decided to log into steam instead of running it in offline mode, It suddenly decided that I was no longer allowed to play as the game hasn’t been released in Japan. :(